‘Is this about these murders?’ she asked. ‘The serial killer with different identities?’
Vogel dodged the question as he gestured for her to take a seat.
‘Look, please bear with me,’ he said. ‘I just need to ask you some more questions. First of all, can I ask you if John was ever violent towards you when you were together?’
Vera Court looked stricken.
‘Why are you asking that?’
‘Please, Mrs Court, I know this must be very disconcerting, but could you just answer my question. Was John ever violent towards you?’
Vera Court answered quickly then.
‘Once,’ she said.
Vogel was mildly surprised. Not that Willis had been violent towards his ex-wife, but that it had only been once. He studied the woman carefully. Was she telling the truth? He was almost sure she wouldn’t lie. She’d already worked out how serious this all was.
It was just that, in his experience, if a man was violent towards his wife once, he almost always was again. And again. This was unusual. But then, everything was unusual in this case. John Willis thought he was a figure out of Greek mythology. No. He didn’t think he was, Vogel corrected himself, he became a figure out of Greek mythology in his own head. Freda Heath had told him that people with DID actually did become their alter egos.
‘It was the beginning of the end really, Mr Vogel,’ Vera Court continued. ‘In more ways than one. He nearly killed me.’
She paused. Vogel waited in silence for her to begin again.
‘He tried to strangle me. He put his hands around my neck and squeezed. All the while, it was as if he were not seeing me. We were in bed. I was asleep. Can you imagine that, Mr Vogel? I woke up to find him on top of me. I was gasping for breath. I couldn’t speak and, in any case, I instinctively knew it would make no difference. There was a pair of scissors on the bedside table. I grabbed them and lashed out. I stabbed him in the shoulder. It wasn’t very deep, but then he went really crazy. He started to hit me in the face. He dragged me out onto the landing and pushed me down the stairs. All the while he didn’t speak. I fell awkwardly. I broke my ankle and my left wrist. He just walked casually down the stairs, stepped over me, opened the front door and left the house.
‘I didn’t hit my head thank God. I was in horrible pain, but I remained conscious. The children were in the house. The eldest, Sam, he was five and little Lucy just three. They both woke up. There’d been such a commotion. Sam came on to the landing. I told him I’d been a silly mummy and fallen down the stairs. I said would he go to the phone and bring it to me. I dialled 999. I also told the emergency services I’d fallen down the stairs. I don’t know if they believed me.
‘I’m sure they didn’t at the hospital. They kept asking me about the marks on my neck, then questions about my husband. I did what so many wives do, even nowadays. I told them nothing and made excuses. I said my husband locked up men who beat up their wives, that he was a police officer. They backed off a bit then.
‘I should have told the truth but, apart from anything else, I was in shock. John had never laid a finger on me before. Although sometimes, if we’d just had a silly row, only like husbands and wives do, he would look at me as if he hated me. Stare at me and not say anything. I’d sometimes thought he might attack me, but he just used to back off in silence and go to the spare room. Afterwards, he would seem to be perfectly normal again, in as much as John was ever normal. He always blamed his migraines.’ She glanced up at Vogel. ‘I expect you know about the migraines?’
Vogel nodded. The times, albeit not that often, when Willis had simply said his head had gone and he had a migraine. Like on the day Melanie had been killed, he would always leave at once. Wherever they were, at Kenneth Steele or out on inquiries. Usually, he would drive himself home. Vogel had occasionally wondered about that. How could a man drive in that condition? Vogel had never suffered from migraines, but his mother had. During her brief yet severe bouts, she’d been incapable of functioning at all, let alone driving a car. Now it was all beginning to make sense.
Willis hadn’t been battling migraines. He’d been battling the multiple personalities, which lurked within him and surfaced at times without him wishing them to. Freda Heath had called them ‘involuntary identity switches.’
‘Anyway,’ Vera continued, ‘John eventually turned up at the hospital full of concern. He actually asked me how it had happened and said he was so sorry he hadn’t been with me. Then muttered about that being the trouble with being a policeman. I just took it, but when the nurse had gone I turned on him. Told him he was a terrible hypocrite and a vicious bastard. He’d done this to me, he had tried to strangle me, then he had pushed me down the stairs. No, half thrown me down the stairs. I was lucky to be still alive.
‘He was so calm, eerily calm. He said I must have had a really bad knock on the head. I was confused. Surely I knew he would never hurt me, not with his history. I kept saying I hadn’t knocked my head and he bloody well knew what he’d done. He wasn’t kidding me, but he insisted that he hadn’t touched me. And you know, I found myself believing that he really didn’t know that he had attacked me. Let alone why and that was all the more frightening.’
‘What did he mean about his history?’
‘Oh, both his father and his stepfather used to knock his mother around. The stepfather used to hit him too. That’s what he said anyway. I never knew what to believe.’
Vogel remembered then Willis’s remark on the day after Melanie Cooke’s death, concerning violence that he had experienced in his childhood.
‘His father was a philanderer too, apparently. He walked out when John was five or six, then his mother took up with another bastard. Or so he said. She was following a pattern like a lot of women do, he told me. Almost as soon as we met — it was a year or so after he came to Bristol — he told me that I could be sure he would never stray and that he would never hurt me. Because of his childhood. I believed it too and that’s part of the reason I stuck with him, even when he became so peculiar and distant.
I thought, well, a lot of women have it worse. I had a husband who brought home a decent wage, provided a nice home, wasn’t violent — until that one awful time — and never strayed. Although he was absent from home so much, I did begin to wonder about that. But he always blamed police business, what a great excuse for a double life, eh?’
Vogel smiled weakly. A double life, he thought. That, he feared, was something of an understatement.
‘What happened after he attacked you? What did you do?’
‘I had two young children. I did what so many women do. I just went home and got on with it, but it was eerie. Uncanny. I tried to talk to him about what had happened. He shut down. He said that I must try to forget about it, try to move on and be thankful I wasn’t more badly hurt. That he wished we knew what had caused me to fall down the stairs, then it would be easier for me. That I must stop this ridiculous thing of saying that he’d done it. He was my husband. He would never hurt me. I almost came to believe it in the end. Crazy, I know, but he was so certain and so calm, quite kind too, albeit distant. I told myself perhaps I really had imagined the whole thing…’
Vogel felt as if his whole body were chilled. The picture emerging of John Willis fitted pretty damned exactly the profile of Aeolus provided by Freda Heath
‘You hadn’t imagined it, though, had you?’ he asked, although it wasn’t really a question.
‘Of course not.’
‘And he really never did it again?’
‘Well, no.’ Vera Court hesitated. ‘But I carried on thinking he was going to, so I couldn’t sleep properly. I was sharing a bed with him. What if he attacked me again in my sleep? Then, one night, I woke up to find him looming over me, arms outstretched, as if he were preparing to put his hands around my neck again. I think I’d only been dozing, because I woke so quickly and I suppose I was half prepared this time. I slapped him hard across the face and he just rolled off me onto his side of the bed. I jumped up. I was terrified he was going to hurt me badly again. But there he was, lying there, looking every bit as if he’d just woken up or, actually, had been woken up by me. “What’s up love?” he asked. “Can’t you sleep?”